Friday, April 13, 2012

Compartment Syndrome

Compartment syndrome is a blood circulation problem where the part of the body (compartment) affected has severely reduced circulation, potentially leading to the death of that part. Depending how we look at it, this can provide a positive and a negative analogy for the Christian faith.

Negatively: If we compartmentalise our faith, reducing it to influencing only one part of our life, then it is likely to die. A doomed faith. This is because our faith must be applied in all of our life, and there is a certain feedback from the faith-life interaction which stimulates our faith to grow further. Real life provides challenges to our faith which will make that faith stronger when we face them head on: questions of doctrine and evolution, difficult circumstances, happy times when we rely less on God for help...

Positively: If we cut off the circulation to the parts of our life which don't fit in with our faith, the parts which are sinful, sinful, sinful - then we can kill them off. Remove the sinful bits by starving them of fuel. Plucking out our eyes which cause us to sin (metaphorically) by not setting any evil thing before us to view.

On an ever-so-slightly related note, you should check out the audio resources of one of the greatest preachers of the only great God: Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones

See if you can guess the link between the good Doctor and the rest of this post! Answers in the comments.